BRITAIN’S longest-reigning monarch wrote on average 2,500 words a day every day of her adult life.

That huge output included the voluminous diary she began in 1832 aged 13. Ending 10 days before her death in January 1901 it covered more than 43,000 pages. In addition she wrote daily letters to her family, government ministers, foreign rulers, bishops, army commanders – one of whom she memorably described as “slightly off his head” – and her doctor.

She expressed herself forcefully. All nine of her children and several of her prime ministers were afraid of her and learned to dread her pungent letters with their strong opinions, blunt criticisms and under linings.

Her husband Prince Albert found her fiery temper so upsetting he preferred to settle marital arguments by letter even when they were in the same house. After Victoria’s death her youngest and favourite daughter Princess Beatrice set about editing her mother’s journal.

She spent three decades rewriting the 141 volumes, removing any parts she disapproved of and burning the originals.

She was determined to destroy anything that cast the Queen in a poor light. Beatrice removed references to Victoria and Albert’s sex life, Victoria’s trenchant views on politics and politicians and her religious prejudices (she once described bishops as “the bigots” and Catholic clergy as “atrocious”).

She also cut out accounts of Victoria’s closeness to her servants. Brought up as an only child with few friends Victoria was fascinated by the lives of her staff. It was an interest her children considered in appropriate. Most of all they feared her revelations about her unusual relationship with her badmannered and hard-drinking Highland ghillie John Brown.

Victoria expressed herself frankly. On February 4, 1862, less than two months after her beloved Albert’s death, she wrote to the king of Prussia: “For me life came to an end on December 14.” The following year she told her diary: “Here I sit, lonely and desolate, who so needs love and tenderness.”

HOWEVER, while Beatrice was able to tone down much of the frankness of the diary, all Victoria’s biographers, myself included, have reason to be grateful that she never got her hands on the letters. As this week’s TV documentary shows they represent a treasure trove.

Victoria considered her letters confidential. It did not cross her mind that any would be leaked so she seldom disguised her feelings. During a diplomatic crisis with America in 1861 she described its government as “such ruffi ans”.

When US president Ulysses S Grant visited with his family she dismissed his wife as having “a funny American way” and his son as “a very ill-mannered young Yankee”. She was equally unimpressed by explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who had emigrated to America.

She wrote that he was “a determined ugly little man – with a strong American twang”. When her son Prince Alfred became engaged to the only daughter of the Russian tsar she des cribed the tsar’s family as arrogant, unfriendly and false.

MARY EVANS

Royal servant Abdul Karim was one of Victoria's obsessions

In May 1898 her least favourite prime minister William Gladstone died. She resisted making any public statement of condolence. “I did not like the man. How can I say I’m sorry when I’m not?” she wrote to her daughter Vicky.

Victoria’s dislikes extended to members of her family. When her son Leopold was five she wrote that he had “a most strange face”, “awful” posture and bad manners.

Later she added: “Leopold was not an ugly little baby, only as he grew older he grew plainer, that is so vexatious.” She pulled no punches in a letter written in March 1888.

She described the wife of the future Kaiser William II – Victoria’s granddaughter- in-law – as “odious”. She felt equally strongly about a range of issues from smoking, which she detested, to women’s rights and vivisection, both of which she opposed fiercely.

Her likes were as irrational as her dislikes. John Brown was rude, unsophisticated and a drunkard but when she hit rock bottom following Albert’s death he devoted himself to her wellbeing. Until his death in March 1883 he never took a single day’s holiday.

Victoria was grateful for Brown’s tireless attention. She also found him handsome and less sycophantic than her courtiers. After his death she wrote to Lord Cranbrook: “Perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant…

"The Queen feels that life… is become most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs… the blow has fallen too heavily not to be very heavily felt.”

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FOR all his foibles Brown was honest and trustworthy. The same can’t be said for Victoria’s last obsession, servant Abdul Karim, who taught her Hindustani and cooked her curries. She made him her Indian secretary but her feelings were also romantic.

She described him as “in every way such a high-minded and excellent young man” but he was sexually promiscuous and dishonest.

He stole one of her brooches and leaked to anti-British organisations in India information about imperial policy. She refused to see his faults and vented her fury on anyone who tried to open her eyes. Her thousands of letters illustrate every aspect of her character.

People who encountered her described her as charm ing, modest and kind. Her letters reveal those qualities.

They also show her as skittish, flirtatious and witty, as in her reply to a request from the foreign secretary in 1886 asking the 67-year-old Queen to open an exhib ition with as much pomp and ceremony as she could muster. “With all the pomp you like,” she wrote, “as long as I don’t have to wear a low dress.”

Sometimes the letters offer us a moving picture of this honest, often lonely woman. To Vicky two days after Albert’s death in 1861 she wrote: “I don’t know what I feel.”

Happily for us she went on to devote the next 40 years of letters to working out how she felt on just about every subject under the sun.